


You are the promised land

by uumuu



Series: Fëanorians beyond the First Age (AUs) [17]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Blood and Injury, Deviates From Canon, Dreams and Nightmares, Father/Son Incest, FeanorianOT8, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Loneliness, M/M, Non-Graphic Smut, Shippy Gen, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 10:30:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17579174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: After the end of the First Age, Maglor carves a new path.





	You are the promised land

**Author's Note:**

> Re:the sun's position, iirc at the end of the First Age the sun is still supposed to rise in the west.

The Silmaril burned in his hand, but he didn't even think to do something about the pain. It really didn't matter whether he hurt or not. He didn't care, and there was no-one left alive who cared. He could have thrown the Silmaril away and his hand would have stopped hurting, but everything else would still hurt. And if he let go of the Silmaril, what else did have to hang onto? What could he live for, now that Maedhros was dead?

Maedhros was dead.

_Dead dead dead_.

He repeated the word with every step he took, with every misstep that made him lose his footing and fall. 

He forged on and on, but he had no idea where he was headed. He took no notice of his surroundings until he heard the sound of the waves. He stopped only when the sea lashed at him, then he marched up and down next to the waves, where the water erased his footsteps. 

He tried to sing. He hummed a melody or two, but the words wouldn't come to him.

He only knew that Maedhros was dead and that he was alone and that he had nothing left to wish for. 

Death beckoned to him – to be reunited with his father and his brothers, to follow them to whatever everlasting darkness was waiting for him too. 

He was angry, too.

After all he had done it couldn't end like this. Maedhros had betrayed him. If Maedhros had been alive he would have known exactly what to do. He would have had to look after him, he would have had to be at his big brother's side forever more. He would have lived for Maedhros, made sure that Maedhros didn't want for anything. Maglor would have protected him and given him what joy he could. 

The sun was setting behind him, casting a blood red shadow over him. There was sand in his mouth so he spat, spat towards the heartless sea before turning his back on it.

*

The place where Maedhros had died had carved out a prominent place for itself in his mind. It wasn't hard for him to find it again even though he had spent long enough by the sea for the lava to have solidified into new, indifferent land. Nothing set it apart from other new land. It was just a black dip in the terrain, skirted by a small forest on one side and rising to a craggy hill on the other. 

He walked onto his brother's grave. He fell to his knees in the middle of it and started banging his fist on the black earth, as if Maedhros could have woken up and thrown off layers of rock and dirt, and risen to the surface to beg for his forgiveness. Risen to the surface to come back and be with him. 

There was a spot that was particularly warm. He collapsed there, and cried himself to sleep.

*

He built a hut next to his brother's grave. He dragged log after log from the nearby forest and embedded them in the tender grass that overlooked Maedhros's rest, as deep as he managed to. 

He worked on it all through the rest of spring and the short, feeble summer. 

The Silmaril was always at his feet, and watched him, and sometimes he talked to it as if it could listen. He asked it questions, as if it could have banished his loneliness and erased his grief. His hand still hurt but he barely noticed after a day's work, and before he went to sleep he lifted the gem up to his face and sang the new songs that flitted through his mind while he worked. Looking at his father's brightest child so up close still kindled a spark of pride in him and when he was done singing he laughed, laughed as desperately as he could. 

A few days after the hut was finished and he could finally sleep out of the wind with a gentle fire burning close to his bed, an earthquake shook the land. The deep, booming sound of it wrenched him from sleep and scared him more than the ground heaving under his feet. He darted out of the hut. He heard rocks crashing on the hill and thunder down the sides of it, though the night was too dark to see very far.

He heard an even greater rumble, deep down. 

He stumbled down to Maedhros's grave and crouched down, lifting his arms to shield his head. In his mind he pictured Maedhros, now a fearsome giant, rocking the earth with his heartbeat.

In the morning, he saw that one of the highest peaks of the mountains behind the hill had been toppled, and a new rift had opened not too far from where the hut stood. 

The hut was undamaged, even though the surface of Maedhros's grave was cracked, the furrows running in all directions and intersecting in grotesque patterns. They reminded him of the scars on his brother's body. They were haphazard and uneven, and strangely captivating to look at.

The lights were even more mesmerising – or rather, the tongues of fire that leapt up from the cracks. White fire, like the spirit that had burned in Maedhros's body, like the light of the Silmarils. 

They didn't go away, even when the first early snow blanketed all the land around the hut. Snow heaped up on trees and rocks and on the roof of the hut, but not on the black glossy surface of Maedhros's grave. 

Maglor crouched down next to one of the flames and tried to touch it. It tickled his hand, velvety, pleasant. He tried to pluck it, but it remained where it was. 

It was hard to stop looking at the flames. Despite the chill winds, he cut a small hole in the wall of the hut, a tiny window from which he could peer at them, when sleep refused to claim him and watching them was like a lullaby. 

*

In the dream, he was falling through featureless blackness. He fell like a bird flying slowly upside-down. When his fall ended he turned over. 

He was at the bottom of a tar-like sea, and there were his brothers' bodies lying side by side. 

They had time, after Doriath, to bury Celegorm and Caranthir and Curufin the grander way, with their armour and their weapons and their most treasured treasures, in a tomb dug deep where animals or orcs would not find the bodies. 

He swam towards them, through wispy, swaying clumps that were not seaweed but the hair of the dead, and solid obstacles that weren't coral or rock but crumbled walls and bits of broken trees. 

There was a hissing in the not-water, a steely wind. 

It was uncannily cold. 

He could not leave his brothers there, like that. 

Celegorm's body was colder than the water, so cold that touching him felt like burning. Undeterred, Maglor lifted his brother and started swimming upwards, to the one gleam of light far above. Celegorm became heavier and heavier as he went. It was not too surprising. Celegorm must have weighed almost twice as much as Maglor, and Maglor had never been a keen swimmer. When Maglor finally dragged him out of the water and onto the shore, far from where the waves licked at black sand he was already exhausted. 

He swam back to the bottom, and carried Caranthir next, and it took him twice as long. 

He was glad he had left Curufin for last, Curufin who was the smallest of his family. Even so, he was heavy like all three of his brothers together. His black hair danced in the not-water and seemed to wrap around Maglor's body and hamper his movements. Maglor's hands were rigid and throbbing spasmodically around Curufin's lifeless body. His legs were heavy, as if he were fending almost-solid mud. Halfway up he realised that he should not have been able to breathe at all, there, in this place where air didn't even exist. His vision clouded. Curufin threatened to slip away. 

From some forgotten corner of his mind he conjured a lullaby that he had sung for Curufin. He screamed the words as the darkness under him tried to pull him back. He pressed on and on and on. 

He was barely able to drag Curufin onto the shore before he collapsed.

*

He woke up sputtering. His arms and legs trembled. His hands hurt like they had never hurt before, even after he carried the Silmaril for days on end. Both palms were bright raw red.

For a while, he couldn't tell where he was. Even after he finally managed to focus on the hut and the sun filtering in through the uneven walls, he couldn't tell if it had all been a dream or if he had indeed dived down to sunken Beleriand and retrieved his brothers' bodies. 

He fed on a rabbit he didn't remember roasting and let a night pass. The next day, with his hands bandaged tightly, he rushed to the sea, the sun rising in his face. 

Realisation hit him the moment he glimpsed the beach: the shape of the shore here, under daylight, was very different from the one in his dream. Nonetheless, he searched and searched. 

There was no trace of his brothers' bodies, neither north nor south. 

As he made to start on the way home he remembered he had left the Silmaril in his hut, unguarded. He almost ran all the way back. The door stood open and the ashes from his small hearth had been scattered all over the floor by the wind. He looked for the Silmaril under his thin, bumpy mattress, in his only bundle of spare clothes, in his one bowl and among his weapons, but couldn't find it. Reeling at the idea of being even more alone, he kicked at a small clump of ash and his foot collided with the gem. He fell to his knees and picked it up, swaying back and forth with the Silmaril cradled against his chest. 

*

There was his father's body, a black thing barely elven in shape lying at his feet on burnt grass. He didn't want to look at it, but he had to. The black shape could have been anyone, really, except for the veins of fire threading through it, frozen in the instant before the still-burning ashes scattered to the wind. The sky was black, too, but there was red at the horizon, something deeper than a sunset. 

A breeze was picking up. 

His father would be lost – again – if he didn't do something about it. 

He took off his mantle and spread it out next to his father's corpse. He took a handful of the ashes, and put it on the mantle. The fabric burnt away and the ashes scattered on the grass. Cursing, he gathered them in his palm again, his skin stinging like it did when he held the Silmaril.

He lifted them to his face. 

He could think of only one way of making sure they would not be lost.

He couldn't carry them with him any other way. 

He took a deep breath. 

The ashes were singeing his hand, yet he brought them to his mouth, opened it as wide as possible and shoved them in. 

The instant he forced himself to swallow tears gushed from his eyes. His lips broke and bled, his tongue was flayed and the taste of blood filled his nostrils together with the stench of burnt flesh.

Blinded by pain, barely breathing, he ate his father's living cinders handful by handful, until there was only the top of his father's head left and his hand could take no more and he had to bend over and eat what was left directly with his mouth. 

*

Pain woke him. His right hand was bleeding, and blood drooled from the corners of his tightly shut mouth. The pain inside was even worse, as if someone had stuck a myriad tiny hooks down his neck and all the way to stomach and was tugging on them, trying to pull him inside out bit by bit.

He couldn't move, aside from the violent trembling that came with the pain and the heaving when coughs racked him and he spat blood all over his chin and neck.

He knew by now what he would have to to do next, where his next dream or vision would take him, and he tried to resist it.

He dozed off for brief periods of time and when he surfaced from the haze of his mind he searched with his hands for other hands. There had always been other hands to hold on to, when he was with his father and brothers and he was wedged between two bodies, two people who loved him and were ready to wrap their arms around him and keep him safe. There had always been Maedhros at the end, with his only hand and his prominent bones that dug into Maglor's skin.

Patting the mattress now yielded only emptiness, always emptiness, and after the umpteenth time he started to cry. 

He begged his father to come and hold him and make the pain stop. He begged Maedhros to come back even for a moment, sobbing that he wasn't really angry and if only Maedhros would hold his hand for a little while everything would have a meaning and everything would be fine. 

Crying exhausted him, and eventually he fell asleep again.

* 

The smoke from the twins' pyre had dissipated. Maedhros had decided to burn their bodies together, on a single bed of wood, and Maglor was faced with one huge pile of ash.

He could stand staring at it all he wanted, but the dream would never let him go if he didn't do what he was supposed to do. He started grabbing clumps of it with both hands. He ate from the right and when he was done with it he turned to the left while the right snatched one more fistful of ash from the pyre.

When he woke up he forced himself to roll off the bed and crawled to the bucket he kept in a corner. It was full of water he didn't remember drawing, clear fresh water. Struggling, he lifted himself and dunked his head in the water, then forced himself to open his mouth and drink. He drank half the bucket, spilling the rest onto the floor as he clumsily pulled back from it. 

Breathing heavily with his mouth open and with his face dripping water, he crawled out of the hut. He rolled down the slope to Maedhros's grave and dragged himself to the very middle it. 

He started digging with his sooty hands.

“What do you want me to do, big brother?” he croaked. “Do I have to dig you out of here, bring you back to the light and eat you too?”

He only managed to dig a small hole before he fell on his back and looked around.

Everything around him was blackness. No stars shone in the sky save for the Silmaril. There was no forest, no grass, no mountains. There was nothing but the hut and that one dot of light high high up where he could never reach. 

He held one hand up to it and imagined his father was smiling down at him while his senses left him again.

He came to to the sound of water. 

The little hole he had dug was full of water, and shone. His Silmaril was inside it, shining twice as bright thanks to the reflection of the Silmaril in the sky. He stared at the light, almost wishing that its peerless radiance would fade from his sight and from his mind. He tried to touch it, and was sucked in.

He fell through the earth, soft fresh earth that parted readily to let him through. It seemed Maedhros didn't want be to dug up, after all – he thought – but wanted Maglor to join him. He fell gently, so gently that he would have been happy to fall like that forever. He fell down to where it became impossible to fall any further a pair of arms lifted him. The arms carried him up up up, he didn't care where because they were warm and familiar and cradled him like he wanted to be cradled. 

The arms dropped him onto a bed and there was his father kneeling atop him. His naked father. Maglor realised he was naked too when his father parted his legs and his calluses faintly grazed his skin.

“Cáno, my Cáno. Strongest, bravest, truest.”

“Atya,” Maglor whispered, overcome with unspeakable emotion at hearing his father's voice. 

It sounded so real.

His father's thighs were so solid, all warm skin and taut muscle. 

His father scooted closer, parted his legs a little wider. 

His father grinned, in a way that was full of love but had something predatory to it, and always made Maglor and each one of his brothers melt and yield and beg to be fucked. 

Maglor prayed to never wake up while his father went through preparations. Moments later his father was inside him.

The twins were at his sides and each one of them latched with their mouth onto a nipple, with quick licks and gentle nips that did little more than titillate him and make him crave more. Celegorm and Curufin grabbed one of his hands each and started it kissing it all over. Caranthir grinned down at him, his hands cradling Maglor's face.

Fëanor came inside him, kissed him and swiftly made room for Maedhros.

“Will you forgive me, little brother?”

Maglor shook his head, but he wriggled out his other brothers' hold, grasped a lock of Maedhros's hair and dragged him down, locking their lips together in the same instant Maedhros took him. 

Caranthir was next, and Celegorm and the twins and Curufin who was feather-light as he rode Maglor and worshipped him with his hands.

In the end, Maglor did wake up. He woke up with the traces of his brothers' and father's touch all over his chest and belly and between his legs. He woke up deliciously sticky and deliciously sore. The hut was empty, but the sheets reeked of sex as much as he did and he knew he was not alone. Without bothering to dress, he went outside.

His brothers and father sat around the small pool he had dug in the ground, on a carpet of grass that covered everything as far as the eye could see, to the horizon where pitch-black darkness encroached on the landscape and erased the only light, the light of the Silmarils.

The ground seemed to be almost transparent under his feet, and he could see a large pillar of light that plunged below to where Maedhros's Silmaril must be. 

He walked up to his family, his lovers. 

“Is this...the Void?” he asked, as his father and brothers turned to gaze at him, though their hands were busy. 

Fëanor stood up and hugged him. “Yes, it is. But you made a home for us here.”

Maglor wasn't exactly sure how he had, but he wasn't going to doubt his father's words. 

“You cannot stay here.”

Somehow, Maglor already knew that, but he protested all the same. “I don't want to be apart from you.”

“We will never be apart. We will always be here so long as you keep us in your thoughts, and you can visit us, whenever the world grows dark.”

*

He returned to Arda from where he had left it. Maedhros's grave and his hut were gone, and a village of men sprawled on the side of the hill. 

The parting was not as heart-wrenching as Maglor feared. He left the miniature world built around the light of the Silmarils with new clothes and a new bag full of food and little trinkets his father and brothers had made for him. His Silmaril was not with him, but he didn't miss that one burden now. 

He walked the changed world where very few elves remained, where even Sauron's name was already fading from memory and the Valar were forgotten altogether, where he was a mere stranger, killing time until the next moonless night when he could go back to the Void and the ones he loved.

**Author's Note:**

> Just to be clear: most of this takes place in a space between reality and dreams that eventually shifts into the Void.


End file.
